Life  Mark II
by Sunlight through Leaves
Summary: AU    Kakairu  " Harsh pants echoed around the dimly lit hallway syncopated by frantically pounding footsteps. The dubious illumination exposed an ordinary looking man with one, atypical feature – a horizontal slash of darker skin across his face."
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Title: Life, Mark 2

Pairing: Kakairu

Based on characters created by Masashi Kishimoto

OOOOOOOOO

Harsh pants echoed around the dimly lit hallway syncopated by frantically pounding footsteps. As he passed under the flickering lights, the dubious illumination exposed an ordinary looking man in dark gray dress pants and a green striped button down shirt that were both well-worn, but only showed it under close inspection. A series of shut, warped doors with crooked numbers lined the hallway and garnered not even a single second glance. Neither did the greenish puddles of water that clung to the deep corners. The skinny figure slammed hard against the rusted crash bar at the end of the corridor and exploded out into the bright sunlight.

A hand came up to shade his eyes as he squinted against the harsh rays. The daylight revealed the man's one, atypical feature – a horizontal slash of darker skin that ran from cheekbone to cheekbone.

Scars were unusual in the world at large, but here, they were unheard of.

The whitewashed walls of the surrounding buildings contrasted harshly to the decrepit interior, and the specular reflections were so bright that he was forced to pause on the doorstep to allow his eyes to adjust. With the roof he'd stumbled out onto being roughly the same color as the walls around and the streets below, if he didn't take that time, he'd likely miss a jump and fall.

The momentary hiatus almost cost him his life.

The far stairwell he'd emerged into the hallway from was almost completely hidden in shadow. He'd jammed a broken and splintered chair against the door handle, knowing full well that it wouldn't do much good. There was still the vague hope that it might slow them down.

Chair and door disintegrated as they were struck violently from the other side. Red nostrils flared to catch a scent as a stubby muzzle poked through the hole. The broken fluorescents reflected in the black-on-black eyes that focused on the brilliant heat signature its prey was casting. The paint job on the outside was annoying and blinding, but it absorbed none of the thermal energy from the constant sunlight. Human beings – and any living creature, for that matter – stood out like a sore thumb.

The enormous creature came roaring through the shattered doorway, bristling with short dark hairs that barely covered the pasty skin and weeping sores. It let out a bellow and dropped to all fours, shoulders and haunches wedging against the walls as it struggled through the narrow passage.

In the open, the thing moved like a cheetah, easily reaching 100 miles per hour as it's massively muscular legs propelled its bulk into an unstoppable charge. The enclosed space bought him several precious seconds.

He whirled and sprinted for the nearest edge, skidding to a stop at the raised lip and peering over the edge as he slung the black messenger bag he carried across his chest to secure it. A narrow alleyway and about a ten foot drop separated this roof from the next – an easy jump to make with a modicum of momentum, but he had no time to back up and make a running start.

With a hiss of dismay, he shoved his left sleeve up to expose a shiny white plastic cuff that covered half of his forearm like a second skin. Two quick taps, and a row of flashing lights appeared across the wristband. A third tap and three quarters of the light glowed green.

The beast clawed the doorway, digging deep parallel marks in the molding. As it finally found purchase, it shot from the opening like a cork from a bottle and crossed the roof in three bounds. It reared to its hind legs to free the massive front paws that had been designed for one thing – rending.

He threw himself backwards off the roof and wrenched his head back as the claws raked a swath in the air scare inches from his nose. The beast caught itself on the wall, dangling over the lip with its claws embedded in the brick to keep from falling farther.

It howled in fury and confusion as its prey seemed to float. The human fell in apparent slow motion, and when he hit the white tarpaper on the other side, his knees barely even bent to absorb the impact. He didn't bother to spare a glance back at the screaming beast.

Pride was a faster killer here than even the beasts.

Had he looked back, he would have seen the furious flaring of nostrils and narrowing of pupils. The rage was unmistakable – the recognition of another predator that was about to steal _its_ prey.

He covered the roof in an easy lope, fiddling with the gadget on his wrist as he ran. Six more hours left, or he would be too late. If he stuck to the roofs, he would be safer - fewer of the beast patrolled up here – but it would take longer. With a jump, he turned his body sideways and skidded to a stop.

Wrong turn.

The roof of this part of the building didn't butt up against anything. The closest one to his location was on the far side of the street below and only one story tall. A 30-foot drop combined with a horizontal distance over 50 feet was too far even for him to make. He risked a quick glance behind him before striking for the other wall.

The large air vent in the center of the roof creaked ominously as immense feet wrapped around it. The metal snapped as the beast mounted the structure. Lither and more slender than its cousin still yowling its dismay on the roof of the other building, it moved more like a cat and less like a bear.

On silent feet, it slunk towards the running figure.

OOOOOOOO

The assassin crouched in the lee of a building, well hidden by the dark shadows stretching out from the wall at his back. The alley he'd holed himself up in was a small cul-de-sac – a seemingly poor choice for someone of his profession – but he left no trail for the hunters to follow.

The fragile piece of paper between his fingers had been creased and smoothed several times. He crooked up his knee and smoothed it out again over a black-clothed leg. A single name was printed in the center of the paper. Beside it were fifteen marks.

Each one designated a previous assassin given this target. All had failed.

He would not.

He had not botched a single assignment and was not about to start now.

A tiny voice in the back of his mind reminded him that there was no time like the present, and he pressed the heel of his hand to his covered left eye, willing it to cooperate and only pain him a little.

The black band dropped to hand loosely around his neck, and he opened his newly uncovered eye, wincing as the black pips in the iris began to spin.

_Accessing._ The neutral, computerized voice that had been his only companion for several months was almost comforting. Within seconds, he _knew_ where the mark was, what they looked like, and their typical daily schedule.

A furious howl broke through his ruminations on the best strategy, and he flattened himself to the wall, looking upwards towards the cry.

OOOOOOOO

Only a soft ping of metal on metal from a loose roofing panel knocked into an antenna warned him that he was not alone on the roof. The new hunter bunched into a coiled mass of muscle, ready to strike.

He dove to the side, barely avoiding the strike. Both front paws dug into the bag at his hip, lifted him completely off the ground as the strap pulled tight around his neck, and flung him to the floor. He bounced twice and rolled to the edge of the roof. The beast snarled in frustration and chased him down, batting him from side to side, until it smacked him hard enough to throw him over the side. The force of the blow threw him into the wall of the far building, and his head snapped against the steel upright of the frame.

Darkness closed in as he fell.

OOOOOOO

The body landed a few inches from his feet. The assassin stepped back as the beast prowled at the perimeter of the roof. Its head swung heavily from side to side as it tried to find the fastest way down so that it could finish the kill.

Though the newest arrival looked nondescript, the black bag cradled in his limp arms clearly identified him as a Messenger.

He fingered the compact pistol at his hip. The assassin was undetectable and worked hard to maintain that low profile. Getting into a fight with the hunters would only provide his location to the administrators. On the other hand, the messenger was technically on his team, and if he didn't intervene, the other man would rapidly become cat scat.

The pistol was equipped with heat seeking bullets and a laser sight, as well as unlimited rounds in case the aiming aids still weren't good enough to help you hit the broad side of a barn.

He never used more than one shot.

To the eyes of the beast, the shadows below it seemed to swell and breathe. The last image burned into its retinas was that of a black-garbed figure emerging from nowhere, before the bullet found its brain.

For a few minutes, he remained in the dubious cover of the wall, straining to hear any sounds of other hunters coming to investigate. The area remained silent as a grave. He was unsurprised. The hunters pursued, fought, killed and died alone.

The messenger still had not stirred. A strong, gloved hand grabbed the shoulder of the man's shirt and flipped him over. Not someone he recognized, but he didn't associate with the messengers very often.

His still uncovered eye informed him of a defensible location on the third floor of the building two doors down, and he knelt and scooped up his comrade.

Only to almost pitch over backwards as the force he exerted was well beyond what was needed. The man couldn't have weighed more than thirty pounds. As he hefted the messenger higher into his arms, the man's arm flopped over his stomach.

The sleeve was hitched up to reveal a burnished cuff wrapped around his wrist.

_An AGU._ The assassin had heard of the Anti-Gravity Units, but this was the first time he'd ever seen one. Only one modification was allowed per person, and, for his job, the eye unit was invaluable.

And for a messenger, the AGU would be just as priceless.

He wondered how much this man paid for the modification.

A quick study revealed that the cuff around the man's wrist was blinking anemically. A "low battery' symbol was one of the things that tended to be universal, and he fiddled with the cuff in an attempt to find the off switch.

When the long bar of light appeared, he punched at the far end of it and watched as the entire bar went dark. His arms screamed in pain as his load's weight increased several orders of magnitude. The messenger hit the ground before he even realized he'd lost his grip. He shoved the arm over to reset the gravity unit, only then noticing the embossed letters reading 'MGU.'

_Modified-Gravity Unit._

"Damnit, messenger. You really should label this damn thing." He set the level at the fifty percent mark and watched the lights glow twice before going completely dark. The messenger seemed to have regained his normal weight.

OOOOOOOOOOO

The rotting roof above his head was not anything that he remembered, and Iruka sat up slowly, clutching the bag to his chest. The tenseness in his chest eased with the closeness of the package. Had he lost it during the fight…

He didn't want to think about it.

It wasn't until he stood and dusted his pants off that he realized he wasn't alone. The squeaky shriek, he told himself, was only due to the fact that he'd never met an Assassin face-to-face before.

If this could be called face-to-face.

The majority of the silver-haired man's face was covered in swaths of a shiny black fabric that looked suspiciously like silk. The luxurious cloth looked strange against the run-down nature of the surrounding room, and he backed away from the danger practically oozing out of the other man's pores.

"Are you afraid of me, messenger?" The voice made every hair on the back of his neck stand up. Silky-smooth with a hint of gravel in the consonants. It was how he had always pictured the voice of death.

Which, he reminded himself, might be why the assassin sounded like he did. Iruka swallowed hard and pulled himself up to his full height. "Why did you save me? I didn't think that was part of your M.O."

"Maaa, we are working towards the same goals, messenger."

His lips pulled back in the snarl of anger. "You _kill people!_ I am not like you."

"I liberate people." The assassin pulled at his gloves, flexing his fingers against the tight fabric. "Would you rather they stay here?"

"I'd rather they go home!"

The lazy gaze pinned him. "Of course you do; that's your job. I only come in if you people fail."

He clenched his fists in an attempt to control the furious shaking and ground out through gritted teeth, "Then I better not fail." He stalked to the door and moved to slip through the permanent gap left from a previous attack.

"Who's your mark?" The look on the assassin's face suggested that he'd picked the word specifically to annoy the other man.

After a moment's hesitation, Iruka handed him a similar slip of fragile paper to the one he'd held earlier. He sank into a crouch next to the assassin and watched curiously as the other's uncovered eye swirled rhythmically. The gloved fingers came up to massage at the corner of his eye.

"It hurts?" Iruka queried sofly.

"Yeah."

"It shouldn't. I mean, this place…" His hands spread wide to include a greater area than the dingy room.

"They put a machine in my eye. The very small, irrational part of my brain believes that it should hurt. And so it does."

The messenger rubbed unconsciously at the edges of his cuff. The assassin might be different from him, but that much he could understand.

"1522, West 1st."

Iruka gnawed at the side of his lip. "Thank you. You didn't have to help me."

"Maybe if all of you would do your jobs, I'd be able to get out of here once in a while."

He left the assassin sitting in the corner of the debilitated room and bit out a couple of choice descriptors for the other man.

OOOOOOOOOOOO

An elegant woman with a sweep of golden hair wrapped up into a complicated arrangement on the top of her head, sat down gracefully across from him. "How can I help you….?"

"Umino Iruka." He folded his hands in his lap and tried not to shrink away from the arms of his chair.

"Umino-san." She reached across the table and patted his hand gently.

"I have a message for you." The ubiquitous black bag sat by his feet, and he reached into it, pulling forth a small, flat screen. "If you would please play it – I need to confirm delivery."

Painted nails clacked on the blank screen as she entered her ID code to validate her identity. She held it up between them as the delivery service's logo flashed across the display. Though the image was backwards, Iruka could see the message as it played.

A little girl with ringlet hair pulled into two miniature pig tails appeared in the center. "What do I do?" She asked someone off the screen.

"Look at the camera, sweetie. You're going to be talking to mom." A male voice instructed.

"Mommy?" The little girl peered at the center of the camera. "Mommy, we miss you. Please come home. I had a recital last week. I know I'm not that good, but I wish you'd been there…."

The message continued in the same vein. The man pleaded with his wife to return to their household, and both father and daughter were in tears by the end. Iruka stared at his hands, unable to watch.

"This must be a mistake." The woman's nervous titter got his attention.

"I'm sorry?"

"This message must be for someone else. I've never seen these people in my life! Your service should be more careful. The woman who this was meant for will certainly be missing it."

Iruka closed his eyes and willed the tears back. "Ma'am, do you know where you are?"

"I am at home." A servant bowed his way into their conversation and deposited a tray of food on the table between them. "Isn't it beautiful!" She turned to look at the surroundings, her eyes glimmering at the gilded walls and the white marble pillars. Her nails scratched gently against the velvet upholstery. "I always dreamed of having a place like this as a girl."

"This place…does not really exist."

The diamond bracelet jingled as she flapped a hand at him. "Oh, don't be silly."

"Have you ever heard of 'Life, Mark 2'?"

"That's the new psych-game, isn't it? I have a couple of friends who were interested in it, but I don't play those kinds of things." She raised a wine glass and sipped gently. Iruka swallowed hard to keep from gagging.

"We are in LM2, ma'am. You've been inside the game for almost a whole year now. These people," He grabbed the screen. "Are _your _husband and _your _daughter."

The nervous titter again.

"Your body is dying on the outside. You've spent ten months in a berth. Your muscles have atrophied. You are starving to death! LM2 activates a REM type state, and at that low level of activity, your body can survive for many months without sustenance, but you are reaching the end of that time. If you do not leave LM2 now, your body will begin to shut down. Your physical brain activity will decrease until you are no longer able to go back to the real world. In a few weeks, your consciousness will fade and merge with the programming here, and you'll just be a ghost made up of a few lines of code. Please!"

The gray eyes narrowed, and for a second he believed he'd convinced her. But then her eyebrows went up and she giggled. "Who put you up to this? A nice boy like you, you shouldn't be playing tricks on us older ladies."

"You don't believe me." It was not a question. Iruka was one of the best Messengers – a person brought into LM2 by a separate organization to convince those about to die from extended game play to log off. He had a knack for making people realize the truth.

Even so, there had been a few that he could not convert.

They haunted him still.

Because the ones who didn't leave willingly were given to the Assassins, as instantaneous death was vastly preferable to the slow fade brought on when the body died and left the mind behind.

"How can I believe you when I'm surrounded by something as real as this place? This is no game. You can see my house, so why do you…"

"No. I can't." Her eyes focused on him again. "LM2 is a marvel of modern coding. The game itself only has the basic framework for this world. Your thoughts and feelings are what produce the scenery around you. You desire an opulent palace and that is what you see. I know the truth about LM2, I have seen the terrors of body-less minds and withering remains."

"What do you see?" She whispered.

Iruka kept his eyes focused on her face to keep from looking at his surroundings. The walls were slick with grime under which were rusty colored stains that looked suspiciously like blood. Water stains covered the ceiling, and the floor was broken linoleum that had been peeled up in several places. The chair he sat in was thread-bare, stuffing falling from the open gashes in the arms.

The food on the table between them was hollow with rot, green with mold and, out of the corners of his eyes, he could see movement on the plate. He didn't dare look closer.

"You don't want to know."

The seriousness faded, and she giggled again. "My, you are good, aren't you? You really should consider being an actor. Oh, and if you would please make sure this message gets to the intended recipient. I'd hate for her to miss it."

"Of course, ma'am." Iruka rose, bowed slowly, averting his eyes to the corner of the ceiling, and retreated.

OOOOOOOOOOOO

The cover of the berth opened with a hiss of hydraulics. The two probes that connected to his temples lifted away from his face and he sat up slowly, massaging aching legs. He'd only been in the game for three days, but his body already felt weak.

He pressed his face into his hands as he remembered the woman escorting him from her house. The minute he'd been free, he'd staggered to the side of the road and was suddenly and violently sick.

"Is she going to be yours now, assassin?"

OOOOOOOOOOOO

The tall maple tree outside the 1st street townhouse made a perfect perch to observe from. Kakashi crouched in the crook of the limb, focused on the addicted woman the messenger had been sent to. When she none-to-politely shoved the skinny man out of her door, he felt his balance shift.

A quick search through his pockets revealed a new sheet of paper to match the two he'd seen earlier. This one matched the messenger's piece even down to the name written on it.

OOOOOOOOOOOO

"Sir." The voice held no emotion. "Another name has been added to the assassination list. The number of players on both lists has increased by twenty percent over the last month, and the number saved by the messengers has decreased almost thirty percent over that same time."

The bank of computer screens displayed the majority of Life, Mark 2's areas. The man monitoring them folded his arms and shifted his weight to his other him.

Had anyone else been in the room, they would have been able to hear the wheels turning in his mind as he did some calculations.

His lips parted and pulled away from his teeth in a sinister smile. "Good."

OOOOOOOOOOOO

Holy freaking god, it's an AU!

I have NO IDEA where this came from, but I've been writing for the last four hours straight to try and get it out before i forgot it.

This will be a multi-chapter, and I hope people like it. I'm never sure how to feel about AU stories...

Review, please! I'd like to know that I haven't gone completely off the deep end. 


	2. Download

OOOOOOOOOOOO

A persistent ache in his back accompanied with the inverted print of woodgrain on his cheek suggested that he had, in fact, slept on the floor last night. Though LM2 was equipped with both calendars and clocks, there was no way to coordinate those numbers with the amount of concurrent time in the real world, so Kakashi was never sure how long he'd been under. The only measurement, which was subjective at best, was how rotten he felt when he tried to stand up.

Last night was quite possibly the worst he'd ever experienced. His knees had buckled the minute he'd put any weight on them, and his arms had provided very little resistance when he tried to catch himself.

Unable to find enough energy to even roll over, he'd closed his eyes and hoped that he'd feel better in the morning.

His previous record was six weeks, and he had no doubt that this excursion had lasted much longer. His stomach growled in agreement.

When he'd first been hired, he'd followed the safety rules imposed on all assassins – only one mark per trip. Each person was then required to exit the game for a week to build back muscle strength and energy reserves for the next immersion. At that time, the jobs took little more than a week of real-world time, and so the degradation of his body had been minimal. His muscles had been shaky after every exit, but with the help of strategically placed chairs and tables – and one unfortunate potted plant – he'd been able to make it to the kitchen.

In short order, he'd proved to be one of the most accomplished assassins the organization had ever seen, and the boss, begrudgingly, began to assign him two marks per mission.

Then three.

And then five, eight, and so forth. This continued until the number of names he was given had reached a point of ridiculousness where he could not keep track of all the relevant information – name, location, and deadline – and neither could the organization.

To remedy the problem, the boss had sponsored his modification. The eye implant allowed him to access LM2's databases and, with a single name, acquire all the needed records for a successful mission. When the boss had outlined the abilities of the modification to him, he'd stared at her in disbelief, certain that the administrators at LM2 would never allow it.

All modifications had to be registered and approved with the central management of the game. Because of the simplicity of the game's coding, anyone with a basic background in programming could write-in specific additions to their character and upload them through the terminal connected to their berth. The designers had been concerned of an overload of coding swamping the servers, but had not wanted to constrict the players to a basic, 'human' existence within the game.

This consternation had led to a compromise that was affectionately known as the 'Cheap Genie' clause of the program. Every player received one wish, within reason and certain restrictions.

Using a modification to access other player's personal data probably fell under those restrictions.

The boss's tawny eyebrow arched at his confusion; her voice tinged with amusement as she answered his unspoken question. "Oh, we're not going to register your mod."

Any player entering the game from any access point was scanned for additional code. If they had an unregistered modification, they were automatically declined, and the code was erased in the scanning process. On the off chance that a player actually managed to smuggle an unregistered modification into the game, all exiting participants were scanned as well, with the same results.

Though most players entered through an access point hardwired to their berth, they almost always exited through whichever point was closest when they decided to stop playing.

If they decided to stop playing.

Kakashi forcefully shoved the ghosts to the back of his mind.

The assassins – it had been explained to him - were provided with non-standard, unregistered upgrades by their programmers and had to both access and depart from the exact same port. The organization's coders had over-ridden the scanning algorithms on each assassin's berth port.

"That being said." The boss had continued, steepling her hands in front of her face. "The eye mod is not the only one we will provide. As none of them will be registered, we are not limited by the game's clause. Is there anything else you want?"

During his last venture into the game, Kakashi had his first encounter with the hunters.

Dark muscle and sparse fur filled his vision the instant before a significant mass landed on his chest, throwing him backwards and snapping his head hard against the cement sidewalk. The massive claws raked at his torso as he'd scrambled backwards on butt and elbows in a desperate attempt to avoid the swings.

The hollow, black eyes, so much like those of a shark, rolled wildly as the hunter chased him down. His hand dropped onto the baseball bat he'd liberated from the previous target and had been knocked aside from the first attack.

A quick twist brought him onto his feet, hands gripping the bat close to the base. The blunt end smashed into the hunter's muzzle. The beast screamed, falling back and clawing at its face and shattered nose. Blood poured from its nostrils into a rapidly spreading pool at its feet.

In the moment of distraction, Kakashi'd brought the bat down on the back of the hunter's head where skull met spine. The beast started to spin towards him, neurons firing too slowly to inform the muscles that the brain had already died. The twisted and rotting body collapsed at his feet before disappearing in a breath of dust and pixels.

"Something to hide me from the hunters." He had no doubt that he would be able to take on any of the beats, but his job would be a lot easier if he could simply avoid them.

Bemusement crossed the boss' face. "Interesting…" She murmured. "Every other person has asked for weapons."

Kakashi cocked his head, thinking of the racks of knives in kitchens, the baseball bat he'd most recently used, pools, bathtubs, gardening tools, apartments above the second story…the list went on and on. He shrugged. "There are plenty of weapons in the game, whether they're intended to be or not. Your other assassins apparently have problems looking underneath the common use of an item or are simply lacking in imagination."

A snort greeted his proclamation.

"A weapon might make life easier." He conceded. "But it's certainly not on the top of my list."

The boss had inclined her head and made a brief note in the open ledger on her desk. "Go home. Rest. We'll have the eye mod done in a week." She waved her hand at him, but there wasn't any need. He could recognize a dismissal when he heard one.

After the modification, he rarely left the game. The organization's programmers provided him with slips of paper with the name of the new mark while he was still in LM2. He continued to complete the missions until he stopped receiving names, and then he emerged, usually for three or four days – long enough to restore body mass and rebuild some muscles – before diving back in.

He had a sneaking suspicion that the boss kept a close eye on exactly how long he'd been under and refused to provide any new marks until he came out.

The first time he'd entered the game after the implant, he'd stayed in for an entire month. At that point, it had been, by far, the longest he'd remained in the game.

Opening the lid of the berth was a serious struggle, and he'd had to swallow a bubble of panic that he was permanently stuck. With no friends and family, it would be a long time before anyone discovered him. He wriggled around, bracing his elbows on his hips, and using the strength of his legs and core to shove his arms upward. The lid swung ponderously, but he managed to reach the halfway point, and the weight of the lid, aided by gravity, helped swing it the rest of the way open.

The minute he'd rolled out of the berth, he'd collapsed to the floor, barely managing to claw his way across the worn floorboards to the fridge.

He'd never felt so miserably vulnerable in his life.

Now the floor bore two parallel scratches leading all the way from the kitchen to the living room. The living room was bare save for his berth, a pair of extension cords, a microwave, short chest of drawers and the fridge.

As he pulled himself into a sitting position by the rough lip of the berth to the soundtrack of his stomach rumbling in displeasure, he was never more grateful for the day he'd spent dragging his fridge from his kitchen to sit right next to the berth.

Fridge was perhaps a misnomer. The thing was a full-length freezer. All the missions he'd accomplished after his initial modification lasted longer than anything survived in the fridge. He'd made that mistake after the second mission.

He'd also been too hungry to notice the fine patina of blue-green mold that covered everything.

His third mission with his modification had been significantly delayed as he'd spent three days glued to the toilet.

A frozen dinner clanked into the microwave, and he punched a set of numbers with a shaking finger before leaning into the comforting hum of the machine. When his arm had stopped trembling, he tugged open one of the drawers and pulled out three energy bars. He ate so fast that he almost forgot to breathe.

A few hours and several plates of half-thawed food – he was not a very patient person – later, he managed to stand up and stagger to the bathroom. Unable to stand long enough to take a decent shower, he sank to the cold tiles and let the water pound across his shoulders.

_Three days._ He promised himself. People continued to waste away in the game, and every life he took was a life he saved from that horror. No one deserved to fade.

Only the people who had seen the process up close and personal could truly understand that.

OOOOOOOOO

Iruka hooked an arm over the door of his fridge as he unscrewed the cap of the milk and took a quick whiff. He coughed hard to cover the urge to gag, flipped on the garbage disposal and poured the milk – which was more chunks than liquid – down the drain. The empty jug clanged around the edges of the trashcan.

Rain hammered against the window. It had been drizzling most of the day, separated by staccato downpours. The worn jeans and plain, charcoal-colored t-shirt he'd hauled on that morning would provide little protection against the chilly drops. His coat was draped unceremoniously over the back of his desk chair. After shaking the dust off of it, and ignoring the layer of dust on everything else, he shrugged it on, buttoned the long coat, and turned up the stiff wool collar.

The deadbolt and security chain rattled slightly as he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. The stairwell was narrow and carpeted in a thin runner that still had its original deep crimson color on the edges and in the deep creases of the stairs but was worn to a pale pinkish tan in the center. The steps creaked softly underfoot as he padded down to the ground level. The hallway on the first floor had two doors leading off of it, and he unlocked the one set into the side of the hall.

A warm, comforting aroma of coffee rolled out of the door, wrapping around him like a comforting blanket. He leaned through the door jam. "Shizune-san? I'm headed down to the convenience store. Need anything?"

The dark-haired barista looked up from the thick book she had spread over her thigh. "Iruka-kun! Welcome back! How was the trip?"

Iruka forced his smile to remain steady and warm as his left shoulder rose and fell in a half-shrug. "Not one of the best." Prior to being hired as a messenger, the coffee shop had been his first stop every morning, without fail. The beverage was a vice that he'd attempted to give up several years ago, but the shop made a fantastic latte. When he'd started disappearing for days on end, Shizune had cornered him and demanded an explanation. He'd managed to splutter out something about business trips that he wasn't entirely sure she bought. But whether she believed his excuse or not, she never let on.

"Oh, sorry…" Her expression turned sympathetic, and the silence stretched, broken only by the smooth jazz that seemed to be the pre-requisite background music for any coffee shop.

"How's work going?" He turned the conversation in an attempt to break the awkwardness.

Shizune spread both hands, waving the book around in the gesture. "Can't complain. They've got me on a split shift, so I'm here for opening and closing. Busy in the mornings, but pretty boring when I get here at six. I think I've seen three people tonight." She paused to take a sip of the coffee mug sitting on the counter in front of her and made a face at it. "Lukewarm coffee."

Iruka let his face twist in a grimace of commiseration.

"You know, I would kill for an Icee. Would you mind?"

"Not at all. I'll be back in a little bit." Iruka waved over his shoulder as he stepped back into the hall, relocked the door, and headed for the second door at the end of the corridor. This entryway opened onto the street. The coffee shop sat on the northeast corner of Maple and Washington taking up the first floor of an old, turn-of-the-century stone building. The façade on the corner was rounded off around wide double doors, and the first floor, with its high ceilings, was almost completely composed of tall windows. The owner of the shop had installed green and rose striped awnings around the tops of the windows as well as soft yellow lights aimed at the wide expanse of glass. Even in the gloomy rain, the shop appeared to glow like a warm beacon in the surrounding dusk. The wide leather armchairs and low tables pushed up against the windows only served to enhance the feeling.

Halfway down the long edge of the building was a narrow doorway, slightly set back from the rest of the wall. When the stone goliath had been a house for the elite members of Greensboro - long before this small town had merged to become a run-down suburb of the bigger city of Lans - this door had been an entrance to the servant's quarters. The two doors that opened into the coffee shop and Iruka's apartment had originally been used by the servants to access the main house. A storage company owned the servant's quarters that occupied the back half of the building and had bricked up the door that led between the narrow hallway and their space. The coffee shop now inhabited the main dining room and ballroom, and Iruka's apartment was modified from the multitude of bedrooms that took up the upper floor. He suspected that the room he used as a living room had, in a previous life, actually been the master bedroom. The kitchen had originally consisted of a small, wood-burning stove, which had been used to heat water for morning coffee or tea. The coffee shop – who owned the apartment as well – had made a minor renovation to it in the means of adding a tiny, ancient stove and fridge. He'd purchased the microwave from one of the cheaper department stores downtown.

The rain had returned to a soft drizzle. Iruka tipped his head back and let the fine drops splatter across his face. A deep breath filled his lungs with the sweet scent of fresh, open air, and a light breeze toyed with the ends of his hair.

Any significant amount of time spent in the berth instigated a deep craving for the out of doors, and he ambled slowly in the direction of the Quick Stop gas station/convenience store. At this time of night, the small shops that lined Maple Street had long since closed and the sidewalk was deserted. Run-down, maybe, but the majority of the serious crimes and gang scenes played out in downtown Lans itself. Despite the weathered storefronts and flickering streetlights, Greensboro still had the feeling of a small town, albeit one with a little less money than the ritzier Stanton on the northern edge of the city, tucked up against the mountains.

Greensboro fell in the perfect compromise – while there was little in the way of police, no one here was wealthy enough to make random muggings worthwhile, and the shops, which were quaint in their own way, did not attract the sort of attention of the boutiques on Stanton's main street. The place was safe to walk about at night, but was not overrun by a crush of humanity at all hours of the day.

The tall streetlamp that hung over one corner of the parking lot of the Quick Stop sputtered to life as he crossed under it, and he turned to look up at it. The light almost never worked, but Iruka knew well what it illuminated.

The weather-beaten, peeling billboard had become almost a historic landmark as one of the original promotion posters for Life – Mark II.

A stylized golden-orange phoenix was emblazoned on a black background with the letters 'LM2' in bold font across the logo. Underneath the symbols was the phrase, 'Life, reinvented.'

Iruka's lip curled up in a disgusted sneer as he gazed at it. The doors to the convenience store wooshed open as he stepped onto the cement patio, but he paid them little attention, still ruminating on the evolution of LM2.

Psych games had taken the world by storm, causing almost more of a stir than the first motion control video games. The controllers were originally limited to a net of electrodes that slid on over the scalp and took the idea of motion control to a whole new level – allowing a player to control their avatar through the thoughts they would typically use to control the movements of their own body.

Gone were the days of frantic button mashing or frenetic controller waving. Most players sat in front of the screen, cross-legged on the floor, and fixated on their character, scarcely remembering to blink.

In the beginning, the net of sensors had a nasty tendency to char away hair and cause long-term scaring of the brain tissue directly below the application point. Besides the health issues, the games were mind-bogglingly expensive. Only the very rich or the middle class who were willing to go without eating for several months were ever able to afford them.

The Kasou Corporation had turned the world of psych gaming on its ear. The designers envisioned a program with no visual interface whatsoever, a method of completely immersing the player in the game. The berth was the solution for that.

The berth consisted of a side-mounted computer that connected to LM2's massive server, allowing the player to create and monitor their account and choose their entrance location in the sprawling, unnamed city. A coil of thick cable emerged from the base, ending in a four inch diameter cannon plug – a special connector unique to the Kasou berth that included a power line designed to carry the required voltage that was much higher than a normal wall socket and a thick, proprietary, network cable. Each berth required special installation, though the workers at Kasou installed around fifteen a day, even now, ten years out from the initial release.

The main section of the berth was a flattened, torpedo-shaped tube. The top section lifted open on thick hinges, revealing only a shaped cushion and a stiff, metal headband that was perfectly shaped to wrap around the back of the player's head and rest an electrode against either temple.

Kasou discovered that people were more receptive to mental inputs when in a state of sensory deprivation. The seal around the outside closed out all light and sound, and a series of scrubbers along the hinge kept the air from stagnating. The molded foam along the bottom was neither comfortable nor painful, rather giving the individual the feeling of being suspended and isolated from the world.

In the pseudo dream state the berth produced, the voltage signals from the electrodes could be fine tuned to a level that barely registered – reducing both health concerns and operating costs.

But the Kasou Corporation saw fit to take it a step farther. In the desire to create an affordable interface, they poured an exorbitant amount of funding into research to further lower the power requirements.

The solution was brilliant, really. And yet more dangerous than anyone could have imagined when LM2 was released close to a decade ago. The interface became nothing more than a mental suggestion – imprinting the image of the almost-featureless white city in the mind of the player. The buildings, their external appearance, their location, etc were all set by the original programmers, but the interiors were controlled by the mind of the person playing.

The game provided little more than a framework, and the gamer saw only what he wanted to see.

This held true even in the case of the people who recognized LM2 for the creeping poison it had become. The world appeared _exactly _as they envisioned it.

The brilliance of this solution was not the cost – though it became the first affordable psych game – or the relative safety the new interface design provided – though no studies had been published to demonstrate the danger of playing LM2 from the Kasou berth – but rather that it solved the oldest problem video games had ever encountered.

Unsatisfied customers.

This game, with no specific coding save the external layout, was quite literally everything to everybody.

The perfect world. _Your _perfect world.

Nothing was more addictive.

His hand clutched at the flimsy handles of the plastic bag that held little more than milk, bread and peanut butter – enough to tide him over until a real grocery run tomorrow. Shizune's Icee was slowly chilling his other hand, but he was so lost in his own thoughts that he scarcely gave it any notice.

Tens of berths installed everyday. Everyone knew at least one person who played; it was impossible not to. Almost everyone knew someone who had died playing the game. And yet it continued as more and more cattle lined up and allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter.

Even with all the messengers at their disposal, the organization could not save all of them.

_I only come in if you people fail._

He had tried to block the assassin's words from his mind. He had tried to let them simply flow out of his memory like so much water under a bridge.

He knew, theoretically, how the organization worked. Messengers first, assassins second. Any person who could not be convinced to leave was killed.

But that process had never been laid out as plainly before his eyes as it was now. The assassin had not minced words.

His feet carried him to a deserted park and across the wood chips and shredded tire fragments to a pair of rusted metal swings that creaked back and forth in the slight wind. One groaned under his weight as he settled on it and picked up a rhythmic squeaking as he rolled from his heels to the balls of his feet and back, swinging slowly in the dark.

Fine sheets of frost began to form between his warm fingers and the plastic cup cradled in his hands. He stared at it, but his eyes focused somewhere in the mid-distance. Every time he failed - _every time – _he signed a death warrant for the customer he was unable to help.

These people were family, friends, and loved ones. The messages he delivered haunted him and chased him through his dreams on the occasion he was able to sleep, even if he had managed to save the recipient.

But now, with such blatant knowledge of what lay ahead…

He gripped the cup so tightly it almost cracked and whispered to the surrounding shadows. "I can't do this anymore."

OOOOOOOOOO

The soft, yet insistent beeping of his phone woke him, and he sprawled across the futon, stretching his hand towards the annoyance.

Though the number wasn't stored in his contacts, it had been burned into his memory over the last three years – his boss. Ever since she had recruited him as a messenger, he was invariably summoned for a debrief each time he emerged. The text message only listed a time, but she didn't need to specify anything else. It wasn't the first time he'd been in her office.

Hell, it wasn't even remotely the first time he'd been in the building.

He'd worked there for close to a year.

Although, in retrospect, he hadn't gotten much work done. For whatever reason, and through no fault of his own – he had remained in his cubicle, fixed to his computer, and isolated by a set of earbuds constantly playing celtic rock – his coworkers sought him out, parked themselves in his extra chair, and bent his ear for hours on end.

The stories were almost always about personal troubles, love gone wrong, struggles at work or at home, or, in the worst case, a woman who seemed to be trying to cope with acute depression without any external help. Iruka had provided recommendations because he just couldn't stay silent, not when these people were so obviously in pain.

People left his office smiling when they had entered practically in tears. It hadn't taken more than two people gushing to their friends about how much he had helped, and his coworkers had, for all intents and purposes, lined up outside his door.

The whole thing earned him a pseudo nickname of being the 'office psychologist.' His cubemate, who had a wicked sense of humor, had even dragged in a fainting couch and managed to stuff it diagonally into Iruka's cube. In order to get it in, he'd had to take out both chairs. Iruka wound up sitting on the raised arm of the couch all day.

The broad, stone steps rose to the small terrazzo surrounded by three skyscrapers. An obligatory fountain bubbled from the center. It was set several feet into the ground and shoot out intermittent spurts of water. The base of the pool was lit with three pairs of gold and blue lights, generating sparkles of color in the leaping jets of water. The sight was truly beautiful at night and quite calming during the daylight.

The Visual Recording Artist Industries took up the first two floors of the southern building on the square. The company's official role was to produce stock footage for advertisements. Half of the company's payroll, however, went to the employees hired to fight LM2. The assassins, messengers, even the programmers – who were listed on the public record as the web managers, the IT folks, and so forth.

As he passed under the steel and glass arch at the front of the building, Iruka remembered the first time he had ever been in his boss' office.

_The knock sounded hesitant, even to his ears, and he pulled himself as straight as he could, willing confidence he didn't feel. He was about to get fired; he was sure of it. A voice beckoned him inside._

"_You wanted to see me, Tsunade-sama?" His voice wobbled a little bit._

_The woman held up her left hand as she sorted through a stack of paperwork. "Umino Iruka, correct?"_

"_Yes, ma'am." He fiddled with the zipper tab on his khaki jacket, wishing again that he'd worn something more professional._

"_You work in the post-processing unit." The words were not really a question, so he stood silent._

"_I've heard some interesting stories about your interactions with our other employees. Care to explain."_

"_I…I've been getting my work done, Tsunade-sama. Staying late when I need to."_

_The golden gaze pierced him with a lance of power, and he was stuck by the sudden realization of why exactly Tsunade was the head of VRA Industries._ _He'd only met her face to face this once, and with a single glace, she'd made him want to confess all his sins. Her head cocked to one side. "Have you tried just telling them to leave you alone?"_

_The question shocked him. "But…they need help."_

_A smile stretched slowly across her face. "You are something else, you know that?"_

"_You're not firing me?" The fidgeting stopped abruptly._

"_Firing you?" The dangerous woman sat forward, chuckling softly. "God, no! I have a job for you."_

_He hoped she would clarify enough to wash away the confusion that was wrapping its silky threads around his brain."A different one?"_

"_Not particularly. Think of it as getting paid for what you spend most of your time doing anyway."_

Iruka took a deep breath before rapping on the door with much more confidence than he'd had the first time. A voice beckoned him in.

OOOOOOOOOOOO

Background chapter of **doom...**

Hope it's not too painfully bad ^^


	3. Data

_Sunlight filtered through brown and white banded feathers, highlighting each barb in the primaries. He watched as the figure laced his fingers together, pressing them skyward, and spread his wings in a languid stretch. Uncertain steps carried him forward and the grass crunched softly under his feet._

_The figure whirled. "You came!"_

_The bright grin aimed in his direction tore at his heart. It had been so long since he'd seen it. "I came to take you home." He clarified._

_"That again?" The smile faltered._

_He understood the reluctance. Home meant a large family. It meant a perfect older sibling and a coddled younger one, and every spare moment spent doing the chores the parents had no time for, the youngest wasn't old enough to help with and the oldest had enough seniority to delegate._

_This world was freedom personified. The wide sweeping wings bought as a modification were evidence of that. "I don't…want to go home. Look at this place!"_

_"This place is killing you." He insisted. "Please…."_

_"No." With three steps, he leapt to the top of the short wall that surrounded the rooftop garden._

_The wings opened wide, and his eyes were drawn to the slight trembling along the leading edges. "Wait!"_

_A strong downbeat stirred clouds of dust. He launched upwards, muscular wings driving him skyward. On the third sweep, one wing moved, but the other did not. It sagged, useless, at his side, and he hung suspended for a heartbeat before plummeting._

"Obito!" His scream echoed off the close walls as he bolted upright in bed. He wrapped his arms tightly around his torso, trying to hold in the pain that had not dulled after 6 years.

OOOOOOO

A green light clicked on the lock next to the door seconds after he heard Tusnade's voice. He paused for a moment once he pulled the door shut, waiting for the telltale vibration of the locking mechanism. Tsunade's office was soundproof as long as the door was properly shut.

She took every precaution to ensure VRA Industries' true mission never escaped these walls.

A carefully stacked pile of folders obscured the closest corner of her desk. Iruka took the chair she gestured to, noticing his name on the tab of the topmost folder. "Good afternoon, Tsunade-sama."

"Afternoon." Silence hung in the air between them while she scrutinized him. Then she returned his smile. "You don't look too bad."

"I got a little out of breath coming up the stairs." Iruka admitted.

She pulled his folder into the clear space in front of her and opened it. Papers rustled as she flipped from one page to the next. "You delivered four messages on your last trip?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"One save."

Iruka was glad she hadn't formed it as a question; he wasn't sure he could trust his voice. His hands clenched involuntarily on his pants. "Tsunade-sama…."

"If you're feeling okay," She cut him off. "I have new assignments."

"I can't do this."

Her eyes snapped up, and all warmth was gone. "Excuse me?" The tone fell somewhere between threatening and disbelieving.

"I can't…. If…" He paused, gathering his thoughts. "If I fail, they'll be killed. The last three times I've gone in, I've saved less than half of the people I was assigned to, and it's fewer every single time! What was it this time, one in four? I'm responsible. I'm not good enough to save these people." Once he started verbalizing all of his thoughts, he was almost unable to stop. He bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood and only then managed to forestall the flood of words.

"And what, exactly, do you think will happen if you quit?" Tsunade rose to her feet and planted her hands on the desk with enough force to make the legs creak in complaint. "Hm? Do you think they're going to leave on their own**?**.None of the people who have been in that long _ever_ leave without outside help." Iruka opened his mouth, but she cut across him. "You've had 26 messages in the last six months. You've saved 9 people. Only 17 have died. Do you know how many would have died if you'd quit six months ago?"

He didn't respond; he didn't need to.

She answered for him anyway. "26."

He felt like he'd been slapped, and apparently he looked like it as well, because Tsunade sat back down, sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose. "Iruka, the only way that you can fail these people is if you don't try. There are other messengers who only save one person, every other time they're in the game, but every person they save is a victory. Please." She met his gaze, and he could see the bone-deep exhaustion hidden behind those eyes. "Please, don't give up. All you gain by quitting is the responsibility for all of their deaths, instead of some."

No one had ever accused the boss of VRA Industries of mincing words. Iruka choked and managed a response. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?"

"Life's a bitch." She agreed.

The folder with his name still rested open under her hand. The top page was an assignment form with a long list of names filling the right column. "I can be back in the game tomorrow morning."

"I'm glad to hear it." She smiled softly at him. "You'll have the information when you get there. We've got…." She dragged a finger down the text, counting silently. "18 targets."

"18?" The number caught him off guard. He'd never been assigned that many in a single trip. "Why are there so many?"

Tsunade shook her head. "Perhaps LM2 had a rise in sales 9 months ago." Nine months was approximately the maximum amount of consecutive time a person could survive in the berth before dying. "It's also possible that more people are recognizing the danger and requesting our services. I don't know. But they are the people we've been asked to save."

"And all we can do is try." Iruka finished for her. He stood, and the chair scraped back on the hardwood floor. "Have a good night, Tsunade-sama."

"You too." She depressed a button in the center console of her desk, and the LEDs on the door's keypad flashed to green.

The door swung open silently at his touch, but he paused on the threshold. "Tsunade-sama?"

The stack of file folders had disappeared from the desk, safely secured in the floor safe below it. Tsunade straightened.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, and don't obsess about it. We all need a kick in the ass sometimes."

He left chuckling.

OOOOOOOO

Soft lights strung around bare branches twinkled through the fine patina of snow. A hum of conversation filled the air as couples strode from store to store along the cobbled walking street. Unlike most games, there was no necessity to buy anything in LM2 – the world around you developed based on your desires. Want a television? Just picture it on the wall and 'taadaa.' Players loved the game because there was no need for money or to put any effort into the game to create the life you wanted. But shopping areas like this still existed in the game to both maintain the illusion of real life and to provide a social forum for players to interact.

One woman shrugged on an elegant wool coat to guard against the evening chill and linked her arm with her husband's, brushing by a huddled figure without a second glance.

A hand snaked out from the rags and made a desperate grab for the woman's arm, but her fingers closed on air, just missing the trailing edge of the woman's sleeve. Her lips parted with a quiver. "Please…" She whispered.

The woman continued her animated conversation with the man beside her.

"Hello?" The figure cried, taking several steps after the woman, before giving up and holding her hands out to the husband. "Hello! Someone, please…." She clutched at the frayed edges of her jacket, turning from one smiling couple to the next. "Can anyone hear me? Please!" The word ended in a broken sob.

Not a single person paid her the slightest bit of attention, and she collapsed to the ground.

Kakashi perched on the rainspout, one leg swinging idly over the open space. He studied the woman below and felt no surprise when one shopper walked directly through her. LM2 was a utopia – beggars just simply didn't exist in this world – so he'd harbored little doubt when he first saw her that she was a ghost.

Well, there was nothing any of them could do for her now, and his mark had just re-emerged from one of the boutiques. Kakashi rose to his feet, intent on finishing the job he'd been sent in for.

The haunted eyes widened a fraction before snapping up to focus on him. She leapt to her feet and took an unconscious step forward. She must have spotted the accompanying step he took backwards, because a look caught somewhere between triumph and joy flew across her face.

He vaulted the small lip that ran the length of the roof and covered the short distance to the stairs in a few long strides.

"You can see me, can't you?" She blocked the doorway. Ghosts weren't confined by the physics of the game – he'd seen them appear and disappear, cover miles of distance in a few short seconds, levitate, and even walk through people and walls.

Kakashi let his eyes focus on the darkness beyond her.

"No, you're not going to fool me." She shook her head. "If you couldn't see me, you'd just keep walking through me. If you couldn't see me, you wouldn't have run when I saw you. And besides," She tapped her temple with an index finger. "My mod tells me that you were watching me."

_Ah, that would explain it. _As an assassin, Kakashi made a living out of not being noticed. Like everyone else in this godforsaken game, she should not have been able to see him. But that fact only begged the question: how did her mod allow her to see him? "Your mod?"

Her lips hitched into a faulty smile. "You _can_ see me."

"As you so eloquently pointed out before." Kakashi agreed. "How did your mod let you see me?"

"It terrifies me." As his cocked eyebrow, she elaborated. "Being unnoticed like this. It would be terribly sad to go through life without anyone ever noticing you. My mod lets me know when people are looking at me. Do you know how many people watch me on any given day? Thousands. All of those people paying attention to me was…fantastic! But lately, no one looks at me. I mean, if no one looks at me, how do I know that I even exist anymore?"

Kakashi opened his mouth to point out that she didn't, in fact, exist anymore, but she continued right over his words.

"And then there was you. I felt the spark again." Her hand strayed to her temple, and sunk her teeth slightly into her lip. "Someone was watching me again. I'm still here. I'm still worthwhile! And it didn't go away. You were _staring_ at me. So I must…."

"You're dead."

"Be…. Dead?" She stumbled. "Don't be silly. You can see me."

"I can see you because I see this world for what it is. I recognize that people have died here, and that, if their body passes on while they are still plugged in, their minds are trapped here. At least for a little while."

"What do you mean?" She shrank away from him.

"A mind without a body can't survive for very long. A week, maybe a little more." Kakashi let his gaze trail away from her, following the path of his target as the man strolled lazily along the sidewalk.

She grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip. "You're saying that I'm going to die? What can I do?"

"No." Kakashi pulled himself free. "I'm saying that you're already dead. There's nothing you can do. If you'll excuse me, I have to go and save someone from suffering your fate." He stepped through her, ignoring the strange feeling as the computers adjusted to the two streams of data occupying the same space.

"You're going to keep them from dying?" She called out after him.

"I'm going to kill their mind before their body dies. They're going to die either way, but my way means that they won't become a ghost, like you."

Though he tried to shake her, ghosts were notorious for being able to move through the matrix of data that formed the game. She followed him through the entire mission, and he watched her fade away only a couple of minutes after his mark stopped breathing.

OOOOOOOOO

The steep concrete steps up to the house were much more modest than those that graced most of the houses Iruka was sent to. He trotted up them and pressed a thumb to the doorbell, listening to the double chime echo inside. No response. If the man was on the list for the messengers, he'd likely be too far-gone to venture outside of his home, so he should be there. He rapped a fist on the door. "Kimura-san?"

A brief sound followed right on the heels of his voice, and he pressed an ear to the door, listening for a moment before calling out again. "Excuse me, Kimura-san. Are you home?" Still no response, though he was sure he'd heard something. He cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass pane beside the door. "Shit!"

The door creaked when he slammed his shoulder against it, but refused to budge. A few commands to the device on his wrist, and the gravity surrounding his body increased dramatically. With the excess weight, and therefore momentum, the door shattered on impact, and the wood floor just inside the door splintered under his foot. He toggled the gravity back to normal. "Kimura-san!"

The man sprawled across the floor, mouth opening and closing as tremors wracked his body. The whites of his eyes had taken on a decidedly yellow hue. Jaundice. His nervous system was failing; his liver had already failed. His body was shutting down, unable to cope with the lack of sustenance.

The waxed floor provided no traction for his shoes, which he hadn't bothered to remove, and he half ran, half slid to the man's side. "Kimura-san, h-hang in there." The words were useless, but they spilled from his mouth anyway. It just seemed wrong not to say anything.

There was food everywhere, covering the hall tables and even the chairs. Kimura still grasped a platter in his hand, and Iruka knelt carefully to avoid putting his knees in any of the dubious food.

"I'm so hungry." Kimura sobbed. "I keep eating, but it never goes away." A hand with the strength of a man facing his own mortality clutched at the front of Iruka's shirt. "Help me! Please!"

"I….I'm sorry." Iruka covered the man's hand with his own, but made no attempt to pull it away. "I can't…. If I'd gotten here sooner, then maybe…." His voice failed him, and all he could do was hold Kimura's hand as he faded away.

Iruka staggered out of the building, falling heavily on the stairway railing before his knees gave out entirely, and he sat down hard on the bottom stair, with his legs kicked out in front of him. He laced his fingers together over his eyes and swallowed convulsively.

There hadn't even been a chance to try and save that man. He'd tried, but there had been so many messages.

And he hadn't gotten there in time.

There were just so many….

OOOOOOOO

The berth's lid swung open with a soft hiss, and Iruka tumbled over the edge, catching himself on the table next to the berth, and paused for a minute in order to get his feet underneath him. The TV remote was only a few inches from his fingers, and he grabbed it. The TV let out a soft chirp as it turned on to the news. He'd found that this was the fastest, easiest way to find out the current date and time.

Ads.

He snorted. Even on the news channel, they had to make money somehow. He turned up the volume and headed for the kitchen.

A deep-voiced man began a voiceover. "What would you do, if you could do it all over again? How would you live? What would you become, if you had no limits?"

_An ad for LM2? _The last ad for the game that he'd seen must have been five years ago. The game was so popular that they'd simply never needed an advertising campaign. Unable to truly sprint with the weakness in his legs, Iruka staggered back into his living room just in time to see the final image of the ad.

The words 'Re-Live' were stamped out across the screen in a shiny embossed font with a band of light arching through letters and a rising sun above the 'L'. Under the words was the slogan: 'Tomorrow is a new day.' The credits for the design company and the release date popped up next. Re-Live was not built by the Kasou Corporation.

Someone was ripping off LM2.

Some company had apparently grown balls in the last few years. LM2 and Kasou had a monopoly on psych games. No one else had dared touch that market until now. Iruka wondered how long it would be before the shit hit the fan.

Perhaps at some point, he would worry about the impact of another psych game on the assassins and messengers, but right now, he had another problem.

OOOOOOOOOO

The bright sun reflected off the white walls and roof. Iruka leaned back against the wall just under a metal ventilation grate. The sound of the air exchange masked any of his sounds, and the heat pouring out of it would do a fairly good job of hiding his body signature. The beasts were unlikely to spot him, even exposed on the roof like this. All he could do now was wait.

The coded message he'd posted on the boards last night would draw any messengers to this location. They couldn't meet in any of the typical social locations of LM2 without being observed. The messengers hid in plain sight – LM2 had them recorded in all of their databases – but, if they gathered en masse, the admins were likely to put two and two together.

"Sensei!"

The voice brought Iruka to his feet, and he grinned as he held out his arms, pulling the brightly clothed youth into a tight hug. "Kit! How are you?"

"Awesome! I saved five people last week!"

He smiled softly. "That's great, Kit." Tsunade recruited messengers from all walks of life. Some – like Iruka – came from her own company. Others just sort of fell into her hands. Kit was one of later. Iruka didn't know all the details as the messengers shared as little information with each other as was possible - hence the nicknames.

He'd gathered that Kit was an orphan, and that he'd taken on jobs here and there to make ends meet. Tsunade had encountered him on the street one day and offered him a job as a messenger. She'd been skeptical as to whether it would work out, but too soft hearted to pass him by. She'd dumped him in Iruka's care to learn the ropes. Most messengers trained with a trial-by-fire method, so it just showed how little she had trusted Kit.

His methods were coarse and unexpected and nothing that Iruka would have ever even thought to try – half the time Kit simply beat the truth into them – but he was one of the most successful messengers out of the entire group.

"Sensei?"

"Hm?"

"Are we the only ones here?" Kit peered around the roof as if he was expecting other messengers to simply melt out of the woodwork.

"So far."

He squatted down beside Iruka with a bored look on his face. "Why'd you call the meeting?"

Iruka leaned forward. "How many messages did you get last time?"

"Fifteen." Kit's eyes widened with sudden realization. "That's a lot more than usual, huh?"

"Yeah, same for me. Tsunade-sama said she didn't know why, but…. I don't know. It seemed more like she didn't want to tell me." Iruka stretched upwards. "I just wanted to know if it was widespread. If it is, maybe we can rearrange the assignments and make it easier to get to everyone."

Kit settled next to him and chewed on the side of his thumb. Besides the universal shoulder bag, he certainly didn't have the look of a messenger – a young teenager with a shock of blonde hair, blue eyes, whisker-like marks on his cheeks, and a fondness for orange clothing that bordered on obsession. Iruka had expected the boy to get tossed out on his face by the first person he delivered a message to.

And he had on several occasions. His general reaction to that treatment was to kick the door in and demand the message recipient's attention.

Given his predilection for violence, Iruka had little doubt that Kit would have also made an excellent assassin if it weren't for one, small problem.

"HEY! Where are you guys?" Kit's patience wore thin, and he vaulted to his feet and shouted, both in volume and in data. Stealth had never been his strong point.

Iruka clapped his hands over his ears, but that did little to block out the flux of data Kit had sent into the system. The beasts certainly knew where they were now. No one ever spammed the game like that, and they would absolutely come and investigate. "Kit!"

He turned, clearly oblivious to the danger he'd put them in. "What?"

They probably only had half a minute to spare – not enough time to run to safety. Iruka dug his fingers into the metal grate and wrenched it free. "Kit, come here." He helped boost the boy up into the duct. "Stay put and stay quiet. Don't come out until they're gone."

"Wait, what? You're coming in too, right? Sensei!" He jerked back as Iruka slammed the grate back in place.

"Stay put." The ruse wouldn't work all that well if the beasts actually scoured the area. He had to give them something else to focus on.

"Sensei!"

OOOOOOOO

Three blocks away, Kakashi almost lost his perch on the peak of a roof when the shout hit him. _What the hell?_

None of the normal players would have done something like that, which meant that it was one of his comrades. The direction of the origin was obvious, and he knew full well he wouldn't be the only one following it.

As he reached the location, he spotted a familiar figure racing across the roofs. He also spotted a moving shadow rapidly closing the distance between itself and it's prey. The shout tore from his throat of it's own accord. "Messenger!"

OOOOOOOOO

Iruka heard someone call out, but was far too preoccupied with the unmistakable sound of death closing in behind him. He yanked his sleeve up and drove his gravity down, trying to get as much speed as possible.

The moment of distraction led to a false step, and he rolled over his left ankle, staggering sideways and taking several short steps to get his feet back under him. He dove left and zagged back right, with the beast on his heels.

Something hit him hard from the side – not heavy enough to be a beast, but hard enough to knock him to the ground and send them tumbling across the roof. The beast's claws whistled through the air above him.

As the mad roll came to a stop, Iruka bunched his legs underneath him, preparing to run, but an arm around his waist yanked him back to the ground. Black cloth was tossed over his shoulders and tugged around his chest. The other hand clapped over his mouth.

"Don't move." A voice hissed in his ear.

_Assassin?_ Iruka remembered that voice and whispered back when the hand had loosened and dropped to his shoulder. "It'll see us."

"The cloth blocks body heat." Kakashi murmured. "It'll see something, but it won't look human. So _don't_ move." He crouched around Iruka, one leg thrown over Iruka's to use the fabric of his pants to break up their thermal output.

The beast padded around the corner of the wall, eyes wide to soak in the thermal signature. It growled deep in its throat and swung its head back and forth to search for them.

Despite his best efforts to remain still, Iruka shrank back against Kakashi's chest. If it weren't for the iron grip on his waist and shoulder, he surely would have bolted. After several agonizing minutes, the beast let out a huff of surrender and retreated.

Kakashi slowly released him, pulled back his shirt and re-tied it.

Iruka lunged forward out of his grip.

"What the hell was that?" They snapped at each other.

"What?" Kakashi shot back.

"Excuse me?" Iruka retorted at the same time. "You tossed me across the entire roof!"

"I was saving your life! If I'd realized that you only weighed ten pounds I wouldn't have hit you so hard, but I still saved your life." He growled. "And at least I wasn't the idiot doing the shouting!"

The argument slipped completely out of his mind, and he scrambled to his feet. "Kit!"

Thank god for small miracles. He'd stayed put behind the metal mesh, exactly as he'd been told. The minute he spotted Iruka, he kicked the mesh out and leapt down. "Sensei, you're okay!"

He cuffed Kit across the back of his head.

"Ow!" Kit dropped to a crouch, clutching his head between his arms.

"You idiot! You could have been killed! What were you thinking?" Iruka planted both hands on his hips and glared down at him for a minute before caving and dropping his hand to the crown of Kit's head. "I'm glad you're okay."

Kit's eyes lit up, and he was back to his feet instantly.

OOOOOOOOO

The messenger was fast. Kakashi dug his feet in for an extra burst of speed. Iruka probably still had his gravity turned down. He leapt to the higher level of the roof and spotted Iruka scolding a golden-haired youth. Kakashi caught the tail end of what Iruka was saying. _The kid? He'd been the idiot? So, the messenger acted as a decoy._ Kakashi shook his head in disbelief._ He could have been killed._

The boy recovered almost instantaneously from the scolding and suddenly focused his attention on Kakashi. "Who are you?"

Iruka whirled and let out a breath of relief. "Assassin. It's okay, Kit. He's on our team."

"And who are you?"

He eyed Kakashi. "Kit. I'm a messenger too."

His gaze went from Iruka to Kit and back. "I thought we weren't supposed to meet, in-game or otherwise. At least, not intentionally."

"There's something strange going on." Iruka scratched at the scar that sliced across his nose. "We're getting an exorbitant amount of messages. I wanted to see if it was universal to the messengers."

"Is it?"

"It is for the two of us, but we haven't seen any other messengers." He shifted his weight between his feet.

"That's why I yelled for them!"

"That's nothing to brag about, kid."

"It's Kit!"

"Enough!" The waspish tone shut both of them. "Look, the beasts will probably be back to investigate again. We probably should make ourselves scarce."

Kit sent one last glare Kakashi's direction. "Okay, Sensei." He yanked the door to the stairs open and disappeared inside. The nearest port was only a block away, and he'd be there shortly.

"What about the other messengers?" The question was a fair one. Kakashi didn't know the exact numbers, but VRA had somewhere around forty or fifty messengers on staff. The fact that not a single one had turned up to this meeting was more than a little worrisome.

"I'll ask the boss." Iruka shrugged and headed for the door. "Maybe she'll tell me what's going on."

Kakashi caught Iruka's arm, holding him back. "You risked your life to save him."

Iruka cut off any further words with a smile. "Hey, it's my job for a reason." He turned to catch up with Kit, only to turn back. "And besides, you did the same."

_True, but I'm not the one running around unarmed._

OOOOOOOOOO

Holy hell... I am soooooo sorry this took so long. Real life decided to explode in my face over the last couple of months, and I had zero free time.

So, a new chapter! I'm having a huge amount of fun with this particular story. It is all going somewhere (I have plans, mwhahahaha).

Love it, hate it, vastly confused? Let me know! Believe it or not, comments tend to guilt me into writing faster - and yes, this is writing faster *headdesk* Damn life, always interfering...


	4. Users

The predawn light found him perched on the edge of an unpadded bench that decorated the wide hallway outside Tsunade's office at VRA Industries. The edges of the wooden slats bit into the underside of his leg, and he suspected that the uncomfortable design was intentional – Tsunade was a busy woman and worked hard to discourage interruptions.

His knee jittered impatiently, rattling one of the loose slats in an almost soothing syncopation. Twice now, he'd risen, sucked in a deep breath, and completed a brief circuit around the hall to try and calm his nerves, but the twitch came back anyway a few moments after he settled back into his watchful position.

"You always were tenacious." Each syllable had a slight tinge of irritation.

"Tsunade-sama." Iruka rose to his feet as soon as she spoke, both a show of respect and a refusal to back down under the glare aimed in his direction. He knew full well that she would have to admit him into her office before she could even scold him for showing up. The walls had ears in most big companies, and VRA Industries was no exception. None of them dared let a hint of their true purpose escape the confines of their secured areas. Iruka willfully exploited that paranoia.

With a final frustrated glance, Tsunade strode past him and unlocked her office, holding the door wide behind her to allow him to follow.

The invitation was much more than Iruka had expected – had she slammed the door in his face, he would not have been surprised – and he gratefully stepped inside.

The minute the locking mechanism engaged, Tsunade snapped. "You're fairly intelligent, Iruka. I thought that you would be able to take the hint. You've requested a meeting on the hour, every hour for the last two days, and you have yet to be granted one, but you show up anyway?"

An expression of feigned confusion slid over his face. "I was told you were busy, Tsunade-sama. I had hoped that, by coming early, I'd be able to catch you for a few moments before the day began. Are you trying to say that you were refusing to meet with me?"

She slammed her hand down on the desk. "Don't even try to pull that innocent bullshit, Iruka. I have nothing to say to you."

The reaction took him by surprise. He had suspected that Tsunade was actively avoiding him. Though her schedule was always packed, she had never failed to make time to meet with him when he requested it. The fact that his persistence and insistence on the gravity of the meeting had not produced a satisfactory result had been a fairly blatant sign of her true intentions, but he had no idea what he'd done to so thoroughly piss her off.

"What were you thinking?" Her irritation still marred the words, but was being overwhelmed by a different emotion that Iruka couldn't quite identify.

"Ma'am?"

"Gathering all of the messengers together. What were you thinking? It would have been the perfect opportunity for them to take you all out in one fell swoop!" She glared at him over the expanse of her desk.

"All of us?" Iruka felt his own anger rise to meet hers. "All? There were two of us there, Tsunade-sama! Something is _wrong_. What has happened to the other messengers?"

"Perhaps they all realized what a stupid idea it was."

She didn't believe her own words; Iruka could see it in her eyes. "Where are the messengers?"

Between one minute and the next, the anger drained from her face and she suddenly looked every one of her fifty-two years. "That's need to know information."

"And…?" He prodded when she didn't seem inclined to elaborate.

"You don't need to know, Iruka."

"What? This has to do with the messengers, but I don't need to know?"

"Exactly."

Her stare warned him against pushing further, but his temper almost overwhelmed his common sense. After a fierce internal struggle, he sank his teeth into his lip to hold back the tirade. "Alright. Fine." He threw his hands up in surrender and turned towards the door.

"Don't."

Her voice cut off his frustrated retreat. "I'm sorry?"

"Don't look into it. I mean it, Iruka. Any action on your part will be met with the strictest disciplinary action as set forth by this company's by-laws. Do I make myself clear?"

_People are missing! Doesn't she care?_ Iruka gaped at her. Had he been in her position, he would have enlisted all the help he could muster to ferret out the information needed to put the puzzle together.

"Do I make myself clear?" Tsunade snapped.

The intensity behind her stare confused him – she desperately wanted him to promise to back off, but he couldn't understand why, and anger at her apathy washed the confusion from his mind. "Crystal." He ground out between clenched teeth, turned on heel and stalked out.

OOOOOOOOO

The sound deadening padding built into the doorframe made it physically impossible to slam her office door, but Iruka clearly gave it his best try. Tsunade winced, but no part of her regretted her firm stance. She knew that Iruka had a devilishly inquisitive nature hidden behind those innocent eyes; she had hired him in large part for that trait. Leaving him in the dark might be akin to adding fuel to an already roaring fire, but telling him the truth would be the equivalent of dumping gasoline on it.

"I don't want to lose you too." The empty office around her offered no consolation.

OOOOOOOOOO

An insistent beeping drew him out of his thoughts. Kakashi saved the file and shoved his chair away from the desk, rising carefully and only stepping forward when he was sure his legs were fully underneath him. Even so, he dropped a hand to trace the edge of the counter as he crossed to the microwave. The food was steaming hot when he pulled it out, and he dropped it to the counter with a hiss. He leaned back against the counter, shaking one leg and then the other to keep blood flowing, and waited for it to cool.

The laptop screen glowed at him from across the dark apartment. The surrounding desk was buried under pieces of scrap paper covered in barely legible notes. Numbers, dates, file names and websites all gathered in an organized mess that made sense to him but looked like little more than a pile of random facts.

He stared through the information he'd been steadily gathering over the last two days, trying to pull a pattern from the seemingly chaotic.

_They crossed the roofs together in silence, headed in the direction of the exit portal. In his peripheral vision, he could see the messenger's eyes flicking from spot to spot, never focusing long enough on any one location to gather any information. His lips moved every once in a while, as if the quiet vocalizations were helping him process whatever occupied his brain._

_Kakashi knew that troubled look all to well. He'd worn the same expression on many occasions when his subconscious was throwing up warning flags even though his conscious provided no logical reason for it. He usually obeyed the imperative – it had saved his life on more than a couple of occasions – and rarely worried about the original reason for the anxiety._

"_What's wrong?"_

_The messenger gnawed on the side of his thumb. "Something."_

Something was indeed wrong, and the minute the messenger had mentioned it, Kakashi had felt it as well. A nagging sensation that he'd forgotten something extremely important, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

The realization hadn't come until he was floating in the bath, his head draped back over the edge of the tub, staring at the cracked tiles that decorated the upper wall of the shower and dozing in the comforting heat.

_There were too many people._

The sudden thought drove him out of the water and across his apartment stark naked and dripping on the floor. He'd grabbed a dirty shirt to toss onto the desk chair to keep from soaking it and fired up his computer searching for the website he'd run across a few weeks ago.

The report was filed as an editorial in a local paper from a town several hours north of Lans, and he had brushed it off originally as alarmist reporting intended to bring recognition to the small town reporter. It included a table of recent deaths of LM2 players along with a very nice colored graph to demonstrate just how dramatically the numbers had risen in the last three months.

It also had current numbers of registered LM2 players.

One of the marketing ploys used by the Kasuo Corporation was the loading screen itself. The time needed to immerse the mind in its false reality was long enough that they had opted to project a two dimensional image of the LM2 logo into the player's mind to assure them that they were not simply unconscious or stranded in the dark. After the popularity of the game had spiked, they added a counter that displayed the number of registered LM2 players - the advertisement working on a very simple human impulse.

_Everyone else is doing it, so you should be too._

The number quoted in the article was lower than what Kakashi had seen the last time he'd entered the game by close to thirty people.

The article was dated two days before Kakashi had last plugged in. The data were listed as current as of the day before that. LM2 had reached a stasis several years ago – people simply didn't influx that fast anymore.

The messenger had been right. Something was wrong.

OOOOOOOO

Death was a very real possibility in the game – the assassins made their living on that simple principle. To kill the mind was to kill the body, so any fatal activities attempted in game could be just that, fatal.

Even so, even intuitively knowing that half of his actions in game could end just as badly as they would in real life, Kakashi had never been as terrified as he was now, hanging over empty space, suspended from roof of VRA Industries by a knot that he fervently hoped he had tied correctly and a long length of climbing rope that he had purchased that afternoon. He'd sprung for the extra couple of bucks a foot to not purchase the absolutely cheapest option, but now he really wished he'd coughed up the extra money and bought the best rope.

Somehow the knowledge that his body was not somewhere else, resting comfortably in a semi-suspended environment, made this all the more real. His hands were sweating profusely and slipped on the rope as he wound it through the carabineer and slowly began to repel.

The familiar action soothed his nerves a little – he'd reached many apartments through this method, and while the whole situation was so much more real here, the process was identical. In fact, if he concentrated hard enough on the rough rope sliding through his hands, he could almost forget that he wasn't in game.

Tsunade's office occupied the northwest corner of the twenty-third floor, two floors from the top. He braced his feet against the slight ledge under the wide, one-way windows, and stared at his reflection.

Most people simply could not be recognized between LM2 and the real world. While their surroundings were dictated by their desires, their own appearances depended almost entirely on how they saw themselves. An incredibly vain person might appear beautiful, and the same went for someone who was ugly but believed themselves to be sexy. On the other hand, a truly gorgeous person who saw only their own faults – a crooked tooth, bad proportions, fat that was not truly existent – and could not see the beauty in themselves would appear average or even ugly, depending on how hard they were on their appearance. Even age wasn't a given – some believed themselves to be permanently twenty-something, some saw themselves as older, some as younger.

For that reason, people in the real world might look like their LM2 counterpart's sibling, parent, or cousin, but very rarely like themselves.

Kakashi was one of the few that fell into the later category. Anyone who had seen him in LM2 would instantly recognize him on the street, so he covered his face as much as he dared while in game as well as covering his mod in his left eye. Not only was it a fairly unique identifier, but it also drew unwanted attention that his clothing typically did not. Enough people in LM2 dressed strangely that his choice of grab rarely drew more than a second glance.

Not for the first time, he wondered about the messenger. The scar that marred his face held his interest more than anything else. Scars almost always appeared to be worse in LM2 than they actually were in real life, because people who bore them fixated on them so much. Was the messenger's scar fainter? Shorter? Was it even there, or was it the shadow of an injury that had not caused a permanent mark on his skin, but was so ingrained in his psyche that it rose to the surface when he entered the game?

_Would I know him if I saw him?_

Though he was lost in unrelated thoughts, his hands worked deftly to fit the glasscutter to the window. The security at VRA Industries was top notch, but Kakashi had more than enough practical experience outwitting computer systems from LM2 to be slowed by that. He'd hacked in before beginning his descent, turned off the motion sensors, and set the cameras to a continuous loop. The door to her office was close enough to being impregnable to make it not a worthy access route, and the same went for all the air handling ducts. The window was really the only logical entry point, but it faced the central plaza, was dangerously exposed to the guards that passed by below every five minutes, and with the one-way glass, it was almost impossible to tell whether or not someone was inside. He worked quickly, not wanting to be spotted by the guards, but was almost continuously checking the non-looped feed from the cameras that was displayed on a tiny monitor at his waist.

_After Obito's death, Kakashi had entered the darkest period of his life so far. It had yet to come to an end._

_He'd dropped out of school, too bored and simultaneously too furious with a system that should have at least put in some effort to save Obito, rather than just ignore the indefinite absence until it was far too late. He'd turned to thieving to make ends meet, living in a loft in the worst part of Lans that had running water three days a week, if he was lucky._

_Luckily for him, intelligence was the key trait for successful heists, and he'd leveraged his own extraordinary brainpower to climb the rungs rapidly from petty cons to elaborate thefts that brought in more revenue. He chose to buy equipment rather than moving out of the rat-hole he inhabited, which allowed him to increase the span of his raids, until the day that he decided to steal from an up-and-coming CEO who had been raised in a family of old money and had a vault of priceless jewelry and stones that would leave him sitting pretty for several years._

_Three weeks went into the surveillance and planning for that heist. Getting into the compound had been easy for him, getting into the estate even more so. The safe itself was poorly hidden - even if he hadn't learned the exact location prior to the heist, he would have been able to find it within a matter of minutes._

_All in all, the relative simplicity of the ingress should have raised concerns, but Kakashi had been very young and very sure of himself._

_The sheaves of papers he found within the safe were not at all what he'd been expecting. Money and jewels were supposed to fill it too the brim. He yanked one folder out followed by another in the faint hope that he'd find bundles of cash buried in the far back corners. The stack of papers in his arms grew heavier with each additional folder he removed until the bottom one spilled out from under his arm._

_Its contents scattered across the floor, and Kakashi gave them a cursory glance before returning to the safe. His brain continued to piece together the snippets of imagery while he shoved his arm into the depths and groped around for anything else._

_A rising phoenix logo. Annotated diagrams of the berths. Smiling faces with names written in thick, dark ink across the bottom. Men. Women. Children._

Obito.

_His grip failed, and the rest of the folders crashed to the ground unnoticed. He scrambled through the mess of papers on the floor, searching for the photo he was sure he'd seen. When that chaotic tactic didn't work, he scooped the documents into a disorderly stack and sat back on his heels, flipping systematically through them._

_Though he was looking for a specific picture, his curiosity wouldn't allow him to simply bypass the official memos interspersed with the images. One in particular caught his eye. Kakashi assimilated the information quickly, his eyes widening from the implications._

"_I won't lie to you. We probably wouldn't have been able to save him, but we would have tried."_

_He whirled, clutching the folder to his chest and feeling very much like a five year old with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He'd been so absorbed in the information covering VRA's true purpose that he hadn't heard her come in._

_Tsunade, VRA Industries' CEO, sat on the edge of an opulent couch directly behind him, one leg thrown over the other, wrists crossed and hands resting over her knees. The position should have looked defensive – after all she had just caught a teenager breaking into her house – but it wasn't, and she pinned him in place with a single look. "I know who you are, Hatake Kakashi. You're good, but my security team is better. We have to be." She raised her chin towards the documents he still held. _

"_I want in."_

_Her lips hooked up into a smile. "I thought you might say that."_

Kakashi smiled at the memory. He half expected to remove the piece of glass, slide through and discover Tsunade sitting at her desk, her hands folded in front of her and one tawny eyebrow raised.

Perhaps, deep down, a part of him wanted to be caught. He thought he wanted to confront her with what he'd learned and to force her to tell him the truth, but that wasn't quite right either. No, in reality, he wanted her to tell him that nothing was wrong, that this feeling of impending doom was nothing more than a false alarm**.**

The round of window glass popped outward with a sigh from the slight positive pressure environment of Tsunade's office. Nothing was risked in this venture, not even the possibility of introducing a toxin into the air. Kakashi waited a moment for the pressure to equalize enough that he could slide the piece into the office and drop it slowly to the floor. He twisted to fit his shoulders and hips through after it.

With just a few minutes to spare before the guard below made his rounds again, Kakashi gripped the handle of the glasscutter and carefully lifted the section back into place.

VRA's permanent records lived in the safe set into the floor under Tsunade's desk. Any worries that she was actually lying in wait for him vanished the minute he lifted the false carpet. No simple safe here, unlike the one he'd broken into all those years ago.

Kakashi set the carpet aside and got to work.

OOOOOOOO

_Still no word. _Iruka leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his hands over his face. The short immersion had barely affected his body at all, and given the sheer number of names he'd been assigned during the last mission, he'd rather expected to be called up two days ago.

Perhaps he shouldn't have challenged Tsunade like that, but she wasn't one to hold grudges when people's lives were at stake, and he knew full well that he never would have been able to resist asking that question.

Messengers simply did not disappear like that, and they didn't quit, at least not en masse. _What happened?_

His computer pinged an alert, and he hauled himself forward reaching for the mouse even as the LM2 forum page popped up on the screen. His abstruse posting to the messengers, which had gone unanswered even in the game, had a single response.

_Sensei: Loved the note; thanks for writing it. Sorry I tackled you. I guess I was just overwhelmed with excitement, but you do have to admit, it was fun. Same time, same place? I'll be waiting._

Sensei? Only Kit called him that, but this certainly wasn't from Kit. The man was clever; Iruka would give him that. The statements meant nothing to someone from the outside nor were there anything odd in them that would draw someone's attention.

He checked his watch._ Four hours_. Should he take the bait?

OOOOOOOOOOO

He was late, but that in itself was unsurprising. The vast majority of his actions required precise timing - assassination and high-level thievery were not exactly sloppy businesses - but interpersonal meetings did not fall into that category. Too preoccupied with more important duties, Kakashi had never bothered to fret about the minor details.

Until now.

In the middle of checking the figures he'd gleaned from hundreds of different websites and articles, he'd chanced a glance at the clock. An outburst of swearing chased him across the room and into the berth.

The sight of a dark figure silhouetted against the white walls eased his nerves, and he slowed from a dead run to a much more relaxed saunter. If he was right, they simply could not afford to miss each other.

"Fun?" The voice had a lilt of barely concealed amusement under it. "You'd call our last encounter fun?"

"Haven't you ever heard of the thrill of escaping death?" Kakashi slouched across the open roof, hands shoved deep into his pockets.

"Thrill, perhaps, but fun…. There I would have to disagree with you." Iruka countered.

"It took me hours to find that post, you know. You could have made it a little more obvious."

"You're serious?" One of Iruka's eyebrows shot skyward, and he peered at Kakashi. "You are serious. Honestly, you're one of the assassins; you make your living staying below their radar. I would have thought that you of all people would be concerned with keeping to the cloak and dagger approach."

"I'm not the one hiding in plain sight, messenger." That statement earned him a puzzled look. The assassins were a bit of a legend within VRA, and only half the stories about them were true. Unable to associate with their non-murderous counterparts, it was impossible for the messengers to know just how much was fact and what was simply inflated stories.

The messenger would likely be very put out if he ever found out that the veil of secrecy did not work both ways. As an assassin, Kakashi knew everything about the messengers save for their identities.

"Then it's true that they remove your ID signatures?" The messenger waved the question away before Kakashi even got a chance to open his mouth. "Sorry. I know you can't answer. Shouldn't have asked you that."

He was infinitely grateful for the withdrawal of the question. Keeping the messengers in the dark was more for everyone else's safety than their own. They were the only ones who still had an intact ID signature, making it possible for the LM2 techs to find them in the real world.

As a group, the messengers walked a far more dangerous line than the assassins. The lack of an ID tag and the preference for atypical locations would attract the occasional beast to an assassin, but the messengers moved among the other gamers. Their job required far less skill but was infinitely more dangerous. One slip up and a quick search to the LM2 databases would reveal their true name and location and put them in extreme danger.

For that very reason, Kakashi had been surprised to find that the paperwork he'd stolen from her office was listed exclusively by ID tag. VRA must have lifted the numbers straight from the LM2 database - the data was 'publically' available to marketing corporations, but the personal privacy information was stripped from it to protect the gamers. Unable to get the entire picture from the ID tags alone, Kakashi was planning on turning the data over to Iruka. He expected his suspicions would be confirmed.

"So why did you want to see me?"

Kakashi cast a quick look around the rooftop - one could never be too careful. "I know what's wrong. More specifically, I know where the messengers are." He fished briefly in one of the many pockets of his jacket to retrieve a small tube, offering it to his companion.

"You know where they are?" Deft fingers pulled the rolled screen out of the cylinder, holding it taught between both hands to allow the imagery to load. Iruka blinked in surprise at the official documents that appeared. "These are...?"

"I broke into the boss' office the last time I was in the real world. One of those is you, isn't it?" He watched Iruka's eyes hesitate at an ID tag number about halfway down the list. It was one of only two that didn't have a date next to it. "26 messengers total. 24 have been marked with a date."

"One of the unmarked ones is me. The other one must be Kit." Iruka sagged back against the wall, brows knitted together, and traced a finger down the list. "These dates are so close together. The oldest and the youngest are barely separated by four days. What happened?"

What, indeed? When he discovered the files, he had hoped that VRA Industries had pulled all of their messengers from the game and that Kasuo had simply failed to remove them from the final count. Those hopes were dashed instantly by a visit to the LM2 forums. In order to facilitate cooperative play, you could search for who was currently online by either ID tag or name. "I checked the online status for those ID tags, and all of them are logged into the game. All except for these two." He indicated the two IDs without dates.

"I haven't been logged on since you and Kit and I left. I doubt Kit has either, if the boss' reaction to my actions is anything to go on. Maybe she's just marking the last log-in date?"

Kakashi had started shaking his head before the question was even fully voiced. "Not according to the online status. They'd all been logged in for days, weeks, even months in a couple of cases."

"Then what...? You think they're dead." Iruka's dread-filled gaze lifted from the viewer to land on Kakashi. "You think they were killed in the game."

The wheels turning behind Iruka's eyes were clearly visible, and Kakashi held his tongue while he worked through the same arguments Kakashi'd gone through only a day before.

"Kasuo wouldn't want anyone - not the company, not the other gamers - to know, so they haven't removed them from the databases."

"My thoughts exactly, messenger."

"This can't be happening. They can't all be dead! If that's true..." A huff of air left Iruka's lips. "Why not me? Why not Kit?"

"I don't know." Kakashi retrieved the viewer from Iruka's nerveless fingers and held it up in front of his face. "Are you sure the other ID tag is Kit?"

"No. We don't know each other's ID tags. It's all part of that whole secrecy thing."

A certain frazzled note to his tone got Kakashi's attention. "Hang in there, messenger." He tugged on the edge of the screen, rolling it back into its case. "It's dangerous to draw conclusions based on uncertain information."

"You get to work with _certain _information?" A bit of levity snuck back into his voice.

Kakashi touched his covered eye. "As certain as their databases are."

"Databases." Iruka repeated, dark eyes narrowing. "We can verify this in their databases. Have you...?" He gestured in the general direction of Kakashi's eye.

"Can't. Not from here." Kakashi stepped away from the wall and looked towards the massive tower that dominated the center of the cyber city - a virtual representation of Kasuo's databases that maintained all necessary information for the game. "The security levels are too high. My mod can hack into the lower levels - player location and mods mostly - but it doesn't have enough underlying code to support anything more robust. I could try, but I'd set off every single alarm they have and bring the beasts down on us."

"The information won't come to us, so we have to go to it."

Nothing in that statement could even be remotely construed as a question. "We, messenger?"

Iruka bristled. "Everyone around me is dying, and you want me to sit by idle?"

"There's a distinct possibility that these people are trying to _kill_ you, and you want to walk into their arms?" Kakashi snapped back. Being an assassin put him in an odd position. Though ending lives would not have been his first choice, the people he was assigned had been given the chance to live and passed on it. He had seen the aftermath of someone fading. Once with Obito had been one time too many.

But he had not seen someone fade once or twice. Between those he couldn't reach in time and the ghosts, he'd had seen far more than he ever wanted. Death was a constant. How you went was a variable, but that didn't mean you were completely out of control.

Kakashi didn't like people tossing their life away. "One look at your ID tag, and they're going to know exactly who you are. If they are really trying to kill the messengers, and they have any inkling that you suspect them, then no power on Earth will stop them from finding and killing you."

"Well, I guess we'll have to be sneaky." Iruka folded his arms across his chest and gave him a decidedly stubborn look.

Kakashi gaped at him. When that didn't evoke any sort of response, he glared. "You are _not_ going with me, messenger."

"Or what? You'll kill me?"

He had always expected the messengers to be more...touchy-feely. Meeting Kit should have thoroughly disabused him of that notion. Even the brief time he'd spent with this messenger should have corrected his mental image. Unfortunately, neither of the encounters had managed to reset his expectations, so he blinked in surprise at the reaction and said the only thing that came to mind. "I'm not going to kill you."

"Oh good." Iruka hopped onto the railing that separated higher roof from lower and dropped lightly to the lower section of the roof before turning back and calling up to him. "Shall we?"

OOOOOOOOOO

New chapter! Okay, so I know only two or three people are probably still following this, but new chapter! And many more to come! (I'm such a failure for not getting this out in a reasonable time. Life just exploded on me and got so busy that finding time to work on something as convoluted as this was not really an option. Thankfully, things have settled out, and I'm going to make time. Damnit!) Anyhoo, that's probably enough of a tangent... I hope you enjoy the new installment! ~StL


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